During recent years many improvements have been made in the visual comparison of ink-recordings of fingerprints. Various optical methods have been resorted to in order to substantially reduce the tedious and time-consuming visual and manual classification and identification procedure. There has been described a coherent optical processor fingerprint identification apparatus in which identification is established by correlating an optical beam pattern representative of the finger to be identified with a prerecorded Fourier transform spatial filter of the fingerprint. In this known method use is made of a coherent light beam, and this is used for holographic and non-holographic systems of fingerprint comparison. According to the present invention non-coherent light is used, and this has a number of advantages, such as less expensive equipment needed, and a lesser degree of accuracy need during the initial recording of the fingerprint. Holographic systems require the use of transparencies for the holographic filter, whereas according to the present invention opaque reflective records can be used, as well as transparent ones.